Thanks to a ride from Magnus, headed up to Nottingcook for UNO's meet organized by Bob Lux.

Great fun, awesome to have a nice long course at a local meet! Woods were already a bit thick, because it's more hemlock-y and pine-y, so just lots of dense vegetation that you need to be ninja-eque through.

My plan was to really have planned my route to the next control before I got to each control, but I found it such a battle to just keep contact with the map while being battered by branches that I didn't really succeed at that... to continue working on.

I had two major mistakes, one was a drift-off/pushed by green at the end of a long leg, think I just had to keep up a bit more focus and look at my compass more (8). The other was a didn't-quite-go-far-enough/distracted by two other runners in the vicinity (17). I was also really slow compared to Brendan on the first 3 controls, he basically made up 3 minutes to me by #3!!! Gosh-a-roni. Guess I was partly a bit hesitant, party a bit slow through the dense woods and partly he was just cookin'.

Had a good fun run around (mostly a bit behind) Magnus for 5-ish controls in the 3rd quarter of the race, he was running well, I couldn't quite get ahead. I just barely snuck ahead confidently descending to #15, but then my mistake at #17 ended up back behind. About half of the controls in the race, it seemed, I was just leaving as Brendan was coming in, but he never quite snuck ahead. Still, he was 2 minutes up at the end, despite having totally missed the water control and thus battling some serious tired/dehydrationess at the end...

Woo, mischief managed (talk given) and a gorgeous day in Bavaria! Finally with time to head out for a run... Ran all around, must admit, not with full knowledge of where I was all the time, but knew enough to find my way back. Garmin died for last bit, when I just ran towards the Research center and back.

Then in to Munich itself for Ethiopian with one of my co-PhD students who now works at ESO here, so good to catch up, meet his girlfriend (moved in!) and eat scrumptiousness!

My german is not doing so well, the words are not flying into my brain at a helpful time... suppose even reviewing the smallest smidge probably woulda helped, but timecrunch!

In Germany, astronomy-meeting time! It's in Garching, a suburb of Munich that is this huge physics/mathy center. You emerge from the U-Bahn and there are 4 Max Plank institutes (Astronomy, Extraterrestial Physics, Quantum Optics, Plasma Physics), the headquarters of ESO, the Math/Technical university, and some other things that I probably haven't figure out what they are yet. It's impressive.

But I give my talk tomorrow, and it's still not done and there's a full day of meeting today. Minor panic. I get to workout again when I either have a fully-fledged talk ready to give or it's actually done. The latter may come first...

A good one! Some hesitations here and there, but otherwise smooth and pretty fast sailing. Was way fun, more technical stuff with the open rock and green and rocks and ups and downs. Almost *no* trail running, very different than yesterday. Still trumped by Sergey V. and a visiting (?) Finn for the Red course win.

The hesitations:
#1 - Wrong rootstock first, didn't even see it hanging out there on the edge of the circle. (5ish seconds?)
#10 - Bit off on bearing, had to search left (5 seconds?)
#14 - Scared coming through the green, stopped slightly short in a too-vague reentrant, mini boulder! (10 seconds?)
#16 - Um, I totally, 100% thought that those two black lines were cliffs, they were a trail, that would have been a way faster way to the spectator control, (20 seconds)
#17 - Boo, hesitant on way down and then was nearly at the darn cliff, looked at it, decided it was a boulder and was trying to find it on my map. Moved a few steps and saw my control at the 'boulder'. (15 seconds?)